The Client:Love Cambridge

The brief: Love Cambridge is the trading name for the Cambridge City Centre Partnership, a dynamic organisation which brings together a wide range of interests, across both the public and private sectors and encourages them to work together proactively on a range of projects to improve the city via the Love Cambridge Charter.

The Charter has been developed to address three areas to help improve everyone’s experience of Cambridge and to make them want to come back again to boost the local economy. It promotes excellent customer service within the city, ways in which we can improve the physical appearance of our streets, and also offers guidance on how taking small steps in reducing your carbon emissions can contribute to tackling climate change. Emerald Frog Marketing was approached to perform mystery shops over successive years to measure the customer service of businesses signed up to The Charter for the Love Cambridge Awards.

Services provided by Emerald Frog Marketing:

• Consultancy on the design and scoring of the questionnaire• Market research mystery shopping • Qualitative and quantitative data collection • Analysed and summary of results• Sponsorship of the Love Cambridge Award for Customer Service

The results: Emerald Frog Marketing worked closely with Love Cambridge to ensure that the questionnaire we would assess the local and national retailers on would cover all aspects of customer service, to include business appearance, staff and service, product and cross sell of other businesses in the City to promote relationships and trade.

We then undertook a series of mystery shopping expeditions to rate the businesses on an equal and unbiased footing. Each business was shopped twice by two separate researchers and the results correlated and analysed.

We provided feedback to Love Cambridge on the winners and runners up of the exercise and sponsored the award presented to the winners by the mayor of Cambridge at the Love Cambridge Awards ceremony.

The mystery shopping and awards programme has helped recognise the businesses signed up to The Charter that has demonstrated best practice. As Cambridge is a prime tourist location, it is vital the thousands of new visitors each year receive a good impression of Cambridge and its businesses to encourage them to return or tell friends about the city.

The testimonial: “Emerald Frog Marketing assisted us with a Mystery Shopping exercise in Cambridge to measure the customer service levels of retailers and businesses in the city. They were very inventive with the scenarios used and provided us with a comprehensive report detailing their findings on time and in budget. They are an experienced team with bags of enthusiasm and I look forward to working with them on future projects.” Becky Burrell, Marketing Manager, Love Cambridge